TV over Broadband Connection

ADSL South Africa (Broadband South Africa), 29 October 2006

Broadband TV will become a viable entertainment medium for South Africans within the next five years. This will bring an end to restrictions in terms of the TV programs that are locally available for watching.

Soon you will be able to watch TV over your broadband Internet connection without the current distortions in picture quality due to slow connection speeds. Broadband connection speeds of 1.5mbps and higher are required for faultless transmission. It seems if Telkom is doing its part by working hard to improve service delivery and connection speeds while lowering costs. Of course Telkom is not doing this for charity but know it will result in hefty profits.

Matrixstream, a Canadian company, “has developed a new kind of set-top box that can handle the reception, decoding and playback of DVD-quality TV signal through clever and proprietary usage of the new H.264 video compression standard. This has facilitated the delivery of a high quality television signal to people’s homes using their broadband connections, and has taken off quite well in North America, with Matrixstream eyeing other emerging markets as well” (TV via IP, Intelligence Magazine, November 2006).

The best part of all is that South Africans will soon be able to make use of these boxes. In other words, your online experience will increase dramatically with the addition of Broadband TV to the current arsenal of online services such as VoIP, et cetera.